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Recordings

Volume 6 in Hyperion’s Strauss Lieder series, curated and accompanied by pianist Roger Vignoles, features a wonderful young soprano in her Hyperion debut. Elizabeth Watts—winner of the Lieder prize at Cardiff Singer of the World in 2007—performs S ...» More

Ludwig Achim von Arnim was a member of the Prussian aristocracy, which was deeply affected by the military disasters inflicted on the Prussian army in the early years of the nineteenth century. Der Stern refers to the appearance in 1811 of a great comet, which the people of Prussia hailed as an encouraging omen, but while they dream of future victory, von Arnim dreams of past happiness.

Strauss composed Der Stern one afternoon in the summer of 1918, while waiting for the visit of a friend, Max Marschalk. When his friend asked him about his method of composing songs, he explained that while sometimes it was a laborious process, at others a single reading of the text would bring the musical inspiration in an instant, and gave this song as an example. He later cited Traum durch die Dämmerung as another, but while that song is an undoubted masterpiece, Der Stern must be ranked among Strauss’s more workaday products—charming, elegant, well-constructed, again vocally attractive, but otherwise somewhat off-the-peg.

After the success of his Op 68 songs, to poems by Clemens Brentano, Strauss turned to Brentano’s collaborator in the Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection, Ludwig Achim von Arnim. Einerlei is a delightful if slender lyric celebrating his beloved’s constant diversity—‘always the same, always new’. In German the wordplay on ‘einerlei’ / ‘mancherlei’ is far more neatly expressed than in English, and reflected in Strauss’s deft sidesteps away from, and back to, the predominant key, a radiant and secure C major underpinned by frequent use of the tonic pedal. The vocal-writing is tailor-made for the soprano voice at its most alluring, full of remarkably wide-ranging intervals—the very first phrase encompasses an entire twelfth from top G to middle C—while the lilting refrain ‘O du liebes Einerlei, / Wie wird aus dir so mancherlei!’ can already be heard in the left hand towards the end of the piano’s expansive and orchestral introduction.

Apart from one other von Arnim setting, Der Pokal, Opus 69 is completed by two Heine poems, one of which, Schlechtes Wetter (see track 4), has earned a well-deserved place in the repertoire of almost every lyric soprano, while the other is completely—but unfairly—unknown. Admittedly, Waldesfahrt cannot help falling under the shadow of Robert Schumann’s masterly setting of the same poem, Mein Wagen rollet langsam, which manages to incorporate all the strange goings-on of the poem, without once disturbing the dreamy onward motion of the poet’s carriage, as though the three shadowy spirits are really figments of the singer’s imagination on a hot, drowsy afternoon.

But Strauss’s version is equally well worth hearing. In the first place, it gives the spirits a far more solid existence by switching from the languid Langsam of the opening to a quirky mercurial 6/8, full of chromatic flourishes (shades of Elektra and Salome) and sudden changes of direction. With his final repetition of ‘denk’ an die Liebste mein’ Strauss gives the song a disturbingly Heine-esque sting in the tail, punctuating the sleepy coda with an unexpected—and inexplicable?—fortissimo outburst.

The illustrative details in this delicious confection hit the mark from start to finish: the astringent handfuls of notes chucked at the page by the rain and snow of the opening, the right hand’s repeated grace-note figure that pictures the mother’s little lantern zigzagging across the darkened street, above all the beguiling Viennese waltz that erupts with the thought of cake-baking, gradually converting the piano’s cascades of notes into the golden locks of the girl in her armchair. It is a song that has Strauss’s name written all over it.